An Action Research On Application Of The Lexical Chunk Teaching In Improving English Writing Proficiency Of Senior High School Students

As an English teacher, the researcher finds that teachers in senior high schools pay great attention to vocabulary in their teaching and students also spend large amount of time and energy on it. However, even though many students have memorized a great number of words and expressions, they fail to express themselves correctly and clearly let alone writing good essays.The Lexical Approach proposed by Michael Lewis in 1993 offers a new perspective to settle such difficult problem. He believes that numerous fixed or semi-fixed language structures in language, called lexical chunks by himself, serve extremely important function especially at the beginning and intermediate stage of language learning. Helping students to use lexical chunks efficiently will lead to better language output. Therefore, the researcher conducted an action research from September 2014 to December 2014 to find out whether the teaching of lexical chunks can improve the writing proficiency of senior high school students in her class in No.89 School in Guangzhou. The research questions are: 1) Can the lexical chunk teaching help students improve their English writing proficiency? 2) Can the lexical chunk teaching facilitate students' autonomous learning of vocabulary?When the research began, an orientation was given to the students to ensure the effectiveness of action research. In this phase, students were explained the knowledge of lexical chunks in detail and then they were supposed to recognize chunks in the texts and be sensitive to those chunks found in class. Then the two cycles of action research were carried out, each of which follows the patterns of “planning-acting-observing-reflection”. The first cycle of action research was undertaken in the following 7 weeks after orientation, during which the teacher observed students' performance in class and exercise and reflected on her teaching so as to make a revised plan for the second cycle. Then, the second cycle was conducted in the following 7 weeks.After the teaching experiment, it is found that the teaching of the lexical chunks does help to improve the senior students' English writing ability. From the analysis of the results, the researcher can conclude that the lexical chunk teaching can enhance students' writing composition scores and increase the use of lexical chunks in their compositions. Besides, the teaching of lexical chunks also encourages students to pick up, memorize, and accumulate lexical chunks by themselves, which has a positive impact on developing their autonomous learning of vocabularies. Consequently, it is effective and meaningful to apply the lexical chunk teaching in English classes to promote students' writing.